Little Wing’s had been the most difficult.
Everyone else had taken the melody Kindred had written for them at once. Cora the Wraith had walked about the ship for several days, humming hers as she tied off ropes and bundled harvests; Scindapse was known to whistle hers on particularly windy days. Kindred had even heard the captain tapping out the distinctive rhythm of her own battle hymn on the wheel during long voyages.
All of those compositions had been accepted and loved and given life immediately.
Little Wing’s took fourteen attempts to get right. First it was too long, then too slow, then not “angry enough,” and then “too angry.” Whatever Kindred tried, Little Wing would listen carefully and then firmly shake her head. Sometimes, she would pantomime battle, her crescent-shaped blades whistling in tune and rhythm to the composition, but it was always wrong, always “too even.”
Now, standing on the branch of a burning tree, Kindred watched the quartermaster singing herself into battle, praising violence with her own hymn. A medley of consonants and vowels scraped against one another as Little Wing slid into the fight, her arms a blur, her whole body somehow moving with strength and speed and grace after so long with little food and water, after burning with steady hatred for so long.
“Percuss this heart
Bless fight with fire
Ha!
A husk to make
Of you! Of you!
Seeds of sweet assailing song
Burst up and out
Crack sky
Cry oh!”
Little Wing sang the words of her jumbled, arrhythmic song, the melody tripping and stumbling. “It’s better for battle,” she had said after Kindred finally got it right. “Less predictable, more free.”
And she was right. Kindred watched as Little Wing moved and struck in time to her timeless hymn, her fighting style not a dance so much as a scrap, and yet graceful despite that. She moved unpredictably, leaping and circling and retreating and attacking, all in a blur, strikes and feints fading into one another as Little Wing fought.
But Kindred found no surge of hope in hearing that familiar song this time, no prickle of power and solidarity.
Fear cut through her now, every syllable jarring.
A breath of prairie wind ghosted through the throng of people on the branch then, quieting and calming them all for just a moment, and Kindred felt resolve like a stone harden in her stomach.
She would follow her grandmother, she would fall into the deeps, she would give up these surface games in favor of a darker, truer forever.
But not yet.
And she was not done with the Once-City yet. She thought of the children playing with their parents in the wild ingresses of prairie below; she thought of Seraph, his wild laughter ringing out as he rocked forward, awed by the mysteries of the world; she thought of Scindapse and her pocket of quiet, waiting as patiently as she could for their chance to leave.
She thought of a city that had given itself over to the prairie, that had bent and moved in accordance with the world instead of the other way around.
Kindred would not let all of that be destroyed, not for Little Wing, not for Arcadia, not for anything.
She exhaled—out the prairie wind—and pushed forward again.
The guards below were climbing again, unaware or uncaring about the threat from above. In the chaos, bodies falling had become ubiquitous.
Little Wing had managed to grab one of the cudgels from a guard, a man who slumped unconscious on the branch at her feet. As the people below began to climb, Little Wing swung the cudgel in a wide circle, brushing back those who had begun to understand her purpose, and she nudged the unconscious man toward the edge.
Kindred moved, nearly crying out as a stray elbow caught her in the chest, her whole body exhausted and exhilarated at once.
She heard Little Wing’s song, listened for the tripping rhythm, finding a pocket of emptiness. She was its creator, after all, and she saw the rhythm of its inner workings laid out before her, its structure like a home whose rooms she knew well, a forest whose paths she had walked many times.
Kindred felt a surge in the bodies behind her, and she used it as Little Wing’s song tripped through pauses and syllables. Kindred’s shoulder collided with Little Wing’s body, and though she was nothing next to Little Wing’s stature and strength, surprise could be a mighty thing.
Little Wing let out a surprised oof as Kindred hit her, their bodies tangling, Kindred’s arms encircling her former friend, former enemy in a hug as they both fell away from the top of the ladder and the guard lying unconscious there.
They dropped, the curving edge of the branch—flattened from so many years of use—holding them for a moment, but Kindred’s momentum was too much, and they rolled, both grasping for the myriad vines rustling beneath them.
Little Wing caught at a few strands but slipped through them, her song stuck on a single, angry note.
Kindred fell.
She reached and grabbed for the empty air between the clots of vines and flowers, her shoulders rising in anticipation of the ground, her eyes squinting nearly closed, her teeth bared in a grin of discomfort.
The fall persisted, time seeming to slow and swirl around Kindred.
Little Wing fell or flew beside her, staring at Kindred with eyes burning and singing fury.
The split between the two of them yawned, and Kindred understood then that her choice had been made, that she had been making her choice over and over in recent days.
Diving below with The Errant and sentencing it to the deeps.
Crossing the line in her cell.
Escaping Cruel House to see Ragged Sarah.
Talking to the Marchess in the Forest.
And now.
Kindred saw it all tracing back to the Marchess’s letter, every action leading there like roots spread from a central stalk.
Someone, or perhaps many someones, broke her fall, and she joggled between bodies, her descent to the root dock halted.
The crowd grew up around Kindred, bodies like swaying trees, blocking out light and sound. Little Wing disappeared behind this wall of people, falling down and through them, and Kindred screamed then, sure that Little Wing had fallen off the dock, off the edge, into the Sea. For a moment, she was back at the Arcadian dock, crawling along one of the cradle chains with Little Wing, seeing terror in this mountainous woman for the first time in her life.
Kindred screamed for Little Wing who, she feared, had fallen into the only darkness her fury and fire could not light.
She felt collisions around her body, a constellation of pain describing her fall. Shoulder and rib. Elbow and wrist. Knee and hip.